Cults - create leadership cults to hide behind

Politicians such as Goebbels and Berneys as well as scholars such as Foucault and Ellul, have suggested that the use of leadership cults provides a simple means of automatically ensuring a populace acculturated to the ontology of authority. And of ensuring that the targets never become aware of the manipulative forces at play. The method they all agreed as being best and most straightforward to accomplish,  was simple historical revisionism.

For example, consider the cult of Reaganism. Ronald Reagan was a (not very good) Hollywood movie actor. For a number of reasons he was nominated and later became president of the United States. He was however, not a popular president. According to the Gallup polling agency his popularity was the second worst of all living former presidents - just marginally above that of disgraced former president Richard Nixon. He allegedly almost single handedly lowered air safety standards in the United States when he refused to listen to safety complaints from air traffic controllers, instead firing them and hiring inexperienced and/or poorly trained replacements. 

Since his death however, there has been a revisionist campaign to transform this allegedly almost universally disliked former president into a 'great man'. The revisionism of a PR campain to elevate this man to great hights of morality and worth has virtually eradicated historical fact concerning his reign in the minds of most citizens of the United States. One small example - it has been alleged that for many years he was little more than an actor reading lines written by others, since he was mentally impaired with alzheimers during that time. This example of course has been perpetrated in many governments, from Castro's Cuba when Fidel became ill, to North Korea when its horrific head of state suffered health issues.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”– H.L. Mencken 1880-1956

"Democracy" is a slippery term. It can refer to Athenian city-state democracy-for-the-gentry only; or the pseudo-democracy of two-party states where one selects between multimillionaire candidates owing allegiance to Straussian ideals; or to the faux-democracies wherein the vote is essentially given only to the inferior (male) half of the species; or Panopticon-democracies where CCTV and its bretheren ensure dissent is minimized into insubstantiality. "Democracy" in the sense usually meant has been despised by a plethora of major western thinkers and philosophers (Nietzsche is peachy but liquor is quicker) and most assuredly by the majority of western leaders who prefer either the guarenteed bias of a first-past-the-post system or other similar systems which favour/ensure non-representational electoral results.

In any case, one of the principle advantages of systems which encourage a "great leader" mentality via leadership cults serve to divert attention from the real rulers - the Trilateral Commissions, the Devos agreements, and the like. By shifting focus to the "great leader" those in the shadows can more easily move unobserved whilst the citizenry "chooses" between two sides of the same coin.